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Technology tidbits

The CAS authentication service is a single sign-on solution for web services used by a number of universities. When authenticating with CAS, the server has the option of embedding a list of user roles inside the encrypted authentication cookie. In this tutorial, I’ll explain how to write a custom role provider in ASPASP Dot Net MVC applications to extract the roles passed from the authentication server and integrate them with ASP.NET role authorization.

BrowserSync is a synchronized browser testing tool with an ever-expanding suite of features. Fundamentally, BrowserSync will watch files for changes, alleviating the need to manually refresh the browser. In this tutorial I’ll explain how to integrate BrowserSync with Visual Studio.

Grunt’s copy plugin, grunt-contrib-copy, is helpful for tasks like copying CSS and JavaScript from a Bower components folder to a friendly directory. Copying files is problematic, however, when you’ve modified the destination files and don’t want your changes overwritten the next time the copy task runs. In this tutorial I’ll explain how to add a filter to the copy task to ignore files that already exist.

Grunt’s copy plugin, grunt-contrib-copy, comes in quite handy for tasks like copying CSS and JavaScript from a Bower components folder to a friendly css/ or js/ directory. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to extend copy tasks to rename files in the destination folder.

The CAS authentication system started as a project at Yale University and is now used by a number of higher education institutions. The CAS NuGet package, authored by Jasig, provides CAS authentication for ASP.NET applications. In this tutorial I’ll explain my process for integrating CAS with modern MVC applications.

Since Microsoft has deprecated SQL Server Compact, it makes sense to transition your Umbraco development environment to a supported database solution. In this tutorial, I’ll first explain how to configure an Umbraco CMS project in Visual Studio using LocalDB for development. Next, I’ll show you how to deploy the project to Microsoft Azure Websites using an Azure SQL Database.

Foundation 5 ships with a dark navigation bar and, unlike Bootstrap, does not have a class to quickly inverse the color scheme. To change the Foundation Top Bar to dark text on a light background, open the _settings.scss file and replace the Top Bar variables section with the settings below.

When you have large numbers of a particular object, it can be beneficial to add paging to limit the number of instances displayed. In this tutorial, I’ll demonstrate a Razor paging implementation that you can use with the Umbraco CMS as well as other projects that make use of Razor.

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Since writing my first lines of code in elementary school I've developed expertise in software engineering, team leadership, and project management. Today I’m passionate about engineering fast, scalable applications powered by the cloud. My skills and experience enable me to deliver a holistic approach that generates results.